Lassoing the moon

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.. continuing from Bricks for a Fool's Paradise

"It's a wonderful life" is a favourite Christmas movie. It is mine too, it brings optimism, a staple of entrepreneurs. "He asks her if she wants the moon, and he offers to "throw a lasso around it and pull it down."" When ethereal ideas convert to day to day realities, do they survive their own weight?

What to teach?

It is essential to bridge the gap between available engineers and what is needed in the future. This forms the goal of the training. Since we know the engineers need to be on par with any engineer in the world, we need to define the characteristics carefully, at least at their current age. What is apparent is that an engineer from just about any other country is usually more responsible both in terms of handling themselves and professionalism towards work. In terms of teamwork though, if channelled right, an Indian engineer is inherently more team oriented than elsewhere. In most companies, an effort is made to collect engineers and then form a team. As teamwork is important and the plan is to train, it makes send to pick engineers that are good team workers to begin with, encourage this behaviour and train in technical area. Also since emphasis is on channeling a behavour, it makes sense to get people who are open to forming such behaviour.

> Hire only fresh engineers.

> Teamwork and other work culture classes form essential part of training. Occupy 20% of syllabus.

> Heavy on practical project

> Teach how to learn on their own - wean away from a teacher. How to discuss a new topic and come to conclusions.

> Learn in depth rather than breadth.

Suddenly training turns out to be very different from normal college training. Emphasis is on learning and not on grades - in fact remove examinations altogether since if the group is small, you know the status of each engineer any day. Rather than promoting fierce competition for marks, you emphasize collective learning. Method used in KarMic is Socratic method, ask a question and pull the answers from someone, anyone in the group, discuss the answers till EVERYONE understands. There are no examinations, assignments are given, to be done in groups or individually. If this is followed by a practical project, all knowledge is integrated correctly. Indian idea of quality, "product for your own family" comes in handy. Producing large numbers is not fashionable anymore.

Teach Whom?

It may be easy to teach someone a technical topic especially if he/she is intelligent but the teamwork issue and long term employment have added a new dimension. Training becomes more a career teaching, than a topic teaching. "You treat a human being and not a disease", my father, a doctor usually says. In our training as well, apprenticeship and creating a decent human who can deal with technical issues becomes critical since you want long term association . Just instantaneous brilliance has limited value in such a proposition. Further, changing basic behaviour is much more difficult compared to changing level of understanding of a topic, that right choice of candidates is critical.

One needs therefore a close association with candidates for a long time prior to hiring. The selection is sounding more like choosing a right marriage partner. The problem of choosing candidates was solved by finding professors in colleges who understood the KarMic model and recommended candidates they would consider as right marriage partners for their own children. If any reader outside India does not understand this, it is understandable but the task of finding the right qualities has been adapted to a well understood parental role in an Indian marriage.

Social Obligations

Long term perspective puts even a fledgling company on notice. Women do not usually have a free choice after marriage in India. The investment on a woman engineer may therefore not be recovered. In India, we could easily have avoided hiring women without adverse reaction, it is allowed to make such discrimination. We made a conscious choice to hire women on an equal basis; argument was basically that if you were in her shoes, you would feel really bad if turned down based on sex. Turns out putting someone else's shoes to check for equality gets used for many situations. Fully one third of engineers in KarMic are female.

Poor form another large class. Starting with stunted dreams, money adds many thresholds to them, sometimes insurmountable. Wanting a significant portion of world's analog engineers in the company, means one can not possibly keep aside any pool of talent. Rural engineers tend to be bad at English communication. Usually they do not make it through normal filters. However, I had attended many international conferences where Japanese scholars were lousy at English, their technical content was unblemished though. Later though, even if their English was poor, they had rehearsed their presentation prepared by someone with better English. We can suddenly start looking at people from North Karnataka as though they were from Japan. While ability to communicate is always an advantage, sometime one can mistake it for capability. It is alright to teach difficult chip design in Gurukul style in Kannada if necessary. Somewhere McCaulay got forgotten. Much talked about English advantage is not what we should compete with; we should do it solid results. One way to equalize the playing field in selection of the poor candidates is to make everything free. This is popular subsidy mechanism used all the time in our country.

With requirement of hands on learning, the course expected a group of engineers to design a chip, get it fabricated and tested, a year long process. The course was designed around this concept since the final silicon teaches a tougher lesson than many hours of class, especially if it does not work.

Fees?

We needed to calculate costs in setting up a training centre. We did it by assuming money for initial costs such as deposits was borrowed from banks to be repaid in 10 years. Adding a monthly mortgage of this amount to a reasonable monthly cost of facilities got an expense number irrespective of number of students. Then add per person cost to arrive at a yearly budget. Reasonable analysis for a novice at those sort of thing. These calculations are shown to prospective candidates. The cost of training came to about Rs 2 lakhs (~$4600) while training about 16 engineers per year even with ridiculously low teacher's salary. We decided that we should charge this to the candidates since entrepreneurship means paying real cost of things. SUBSIDIES kill entrepreneurship, that is why so many small scale industries are sick.

However to solve a poor student's problem, this is a loan provided by the design centre the engineer will belong in the future. You have trusted an engineer with a loan that a normal bank would not touch. A twist is that the company reduces the loan amount to zero in four yearly instalments - an initial engineer's advantage slowly converts to a company's advantage. In essence the engineer has not paid anything over a long term.

Our assumptions is that the lost earnings of a year are more than made up by the more rapid capability of a well trained engineer. In typical American style, the value of the training is emphasized by noting that the 2 lakh rupees corresponds approximately Rs 200 per hour per student to the teacher, much higher than amount required to buy a good meal or a movie. So they were there to learn, I was not there to teach.

Proof of the pudding?

In the first year of existence, 8 engineers designed two projects, which were fabricated and found functional. They won awards at India's VLSI conferences. That year as far as we know, no other institution in India had silicon.

Welcomed with Open Arms?

Since the institute was named a Training Centre, it attracted a bunch of derision, these being in the shudra class, compared to the so called class A category. KarMic Training Centre is not accredited, is not affiliated to any university but carries on creating good engineers.

"Gandhi could do without the Nobel Peace Prize. Whether the Nobel committee can do without Gandhi, is the question." What do you say when the secretary of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Geir Lundestad, says, "The greatest omission in our 106 year history is undoubtedly that Mahatma Gandhi never received the Nobel Peace Prize."

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/We_missed_Mahatma_Gandhi/articleshow/2181375.cms